EP # 204 - The 3-Step Process to Identify and Manage High-Maintenance Clients

How to spot red flags early, set boundaries, and turn challenging clients into growth opportunities

Episode Summary:

Do you dread working with certain clients but can’t tell if they’re demanding (good for growth) or difficult (bad for business)? 

In this episode, Maggie breaks down the critical differences between the two and shares her proven 3-step process to identify, manage, and—when necessary—part ways with high-maintenance clients. Learn how to protect your boundaries, improve your services, and focus on clients who respect your work.

Key Takeaways:

1. Demanding vs. Difficult Clients
   • Demanding clients push you to improve, pay on time, and respect agreements—they’re worth keeping!
   • Difficult clients drain your energy, break boundaries, and are impossible to please.
2. The 3-Step Process to Manage Them
   • Step 1: Spot the Red Flags Early
     • Unreasonable expectations, chronic indecision, or refusal to follow processes.
   • Step 2: Set Boundaries (and Stick to Them)
     • Communicate clearly, document agreements, and don’t over-accommodate.
   • Step 3: Decide—Fix or Fire the Relationship
     • Salvage relationships with fair clients; gracefully exit toxic ones.
3. Pro Tips for Service Providers
   • Turn demanding clients into growth opportunities by refining your processes.
   • Never let difficult clients dictate your business model—prioritize your well-being and other clients.

Quotable Moments:

• “Demanding clients make you better; difficult clients make you bitter.”
• “Your boundaries teach clients how to treat you.”
• “Fire clients who cost you more than they pay you—in time, energy, or sanity.”

Call to Action:

• Apply the 3-step process to your most challenging client this week.
• Share your stories! Have a client dilemma? Email Maggie at maggie@stairwaytoleadership.com
• Subscribe & Review if this episode helped you—it means the world!

Follow Maggie:

• Website: https://stairwaytoleadership.com
• Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/maggie.perotin.s2l/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggie-perotin-business-and-leadership-coach/

Tag a business owner who needs to hear this! 🎧 #DiamondEffectPodcast

Transcript

EP # 204 – The 3-Step Process to Identify and Manage High-Maintenance Clients

How to spot red flags early, set boundaries, and turn challenging clients into growth opportunities

Audio Only - All Participants: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody to Diamond Effect Podcast, episode 204. Lately I've been coaching my clients on dealing with different challenges that come up when delivering the service, so I decided to do an episode and tell you how I think about different type of clients that maybe present challenges in your business, and especially the difference between demanding clients versus difficult clients because.

Some business owners confuse that, and they don't necessarily wanna work with challenging clients. They put them all in one bucket, but then they miss an opportunity to grow and innovate and get better. Or they work with everybody, even difficult clients, and then that, pushes them to be flexible on their boundaries, maybe work for way less than they should normally do.

Be feel [00:01:00] like they're working for free or being, or being taking advantage of, and that's not necessarily a great place to run your business from. So let's start with my own definition of a demanding client versus difficult client. A demanding client is somebody who wants value for their money.

Okay, so they are very aware of what they are paying for their services, and they want to get the value for their money. So they're not afraid on pointing things that don't meet their standard, whether it's part of the customer experience or the process. When there is challenges with the service delivery, they're not afraid to point it out to you to tell you where you can do better and tell you that whatever part of their journey with you doesn't meet their standards or something that they expected from you based [00:02:00] on your marketing or sales conversations that you had.

Now a demanding client will hold their part of the agreement that you have, meaning they will pay on time. They'll give you the information that you need to deliver the project or whatever you're working on, right? So they will be. Fair in a way when they will be willing to pay the money. They will be on time.

They will hold their part of the agreement, but they will be demanding in terms of how the service is delivered.

For example, there's couple of different types of demanding client. Client might come to you with a challenge that you just never dealt before, but you feel confident you can help them. So it could be new type of project that as a contractor you've never handled before, but you're excited for it.

You want an opportunity to learn, but it might be.

But it may be challenging because it's the first time, right? Or it could be, if you are in health [00:03:00] and wellness, it might be a client who has an issue that you've never helped anyone before. I often have clients who are also, demanding or challenging for me in a way where they present a business problem or they're.

Own personal development challenges that I haven't dealt before or that I haven't dealt with that personality type of the person. And as a coach, I need to figure out and research how to get to them, how to help them solve the challenge or get them to try things that I recommend, for example. So personally, I welcome demanding clients because I think of them as d.

Make me better as a service provider, as a business owner, right? They force me to research, to look outside of the box, to have my process tied or fix maybe some loopholes or a little loose end because they will point out things that [00:04:00] maybe other clients either don't see or don't necessarily are willing to point out.

So, as much as we love easy going clients who are just happy to work with us and we do the best for them, and definitely we wanna have a lot of those occasionally demanding clients. It's never bad for our business because those are the clients that make us better. And at the same time are willing to pay for prices, respect our boundaries, honor their part of the contract and the agreement we have.

Now let's move on to a difficult client. Difficult client is somebody who has unreasonable expectations, who you cannot make happy. So no matter what you do, no matter how far above and beyond we go, the boundaries that we allow them to break, they'll never be happy.

Somebody who has hard time making decisions doesn't. Hold their part of the contract so it doesn't deliver [00:05:00] information you need is delayed. With that information, you have to follow up with them, so somebody very difficult to deal with from the beginning to an end. From those type of clients, we usually learn what not to do.

Those type of clients make us usually create boundaries in our business, put things in contract and so on that we'll learn from that we don't wanna experience anymore. Now, ideally as a business owner, you wanna be able to filter out those clients as soon as possible and never get into service delivery relationship with them.

Occasionally it happens. We just don't notice certain things of, again, we've never dealt with that type of client and we start working with them and it turns out that, we do feel like we're being taken advantage of, that we're working for free because those clients like to penny pinch, right?

So they're just very difficult to deal with. One thing that I wanna say that when you [00:06:00] are in that situation and you end up working with a difficult client, you do not want to be scared of them, right? You do not want them to lead that relationship and drag you into situations where you're being taken advantage of, or no matter what you do, you're not happy.

You want to establish your boundaries. You wanna hold on to them and potentially those are the clients that sometimes we just need to let go

because whatever money they pay us, it's not worth it. The time and energy we would spend trying to please them. When that's impossible, we can spend that time and energy looking for our best ideal clients. So just to recap, the key difference between demanding client and difficult client, demanding client challenges you to be better.

They demand better service. They demand you fixing maybe some loopholes or challenges in the process that they've [00:07:00] noticed, but they are. Respecting their type of their part of the contract. They're paying you freely. They're delivering information, they're upholding their part of the commitment, and they're fair in how they , judge the situations or judge your process, right?

They're not picky on every single thing. They're just pointing out what doesn't work for them.

Or they're just pointing out what doesn't meet their standard or what they were expecting based on whatever you had conversation you had during the sales process. Whereas a difficult client makes your life hell, it's stressful to deal with. You never know if they're gonna something or not, or one time. One moment they like something and two weeks later they don't like something that they already agreed on.

Somebody who changes their mind is penny pinching you, [00:08:00] not willing to uphold their part of the commitments. So just a very difficult person to deal with. And unreasonable quite often as well. So now I'll share some examples of both type of clients from my business or from my clients, but I want you to also think about your business and the past clients you've dealt with, or the current clients that you have and identify.

Those type of clients, which clients for you are demanding versus which ones are difficult? So for me, as I mentioned before, a demanding client will be somebody who. Either has different challenges in their resumes that I haven't encountered yet before, or maybe they have different mindset blogs or different perspective or different way of communicating that I haven't dealt with before.

And as a coach, I need to learn more about them, learn how to get [00:09:00] to them, how to collaborate with them or even figure out with them their business challenges and solutions for them.

I treat those clients as a challenge for me to get better as a challenge for me to maybe improve my process in onboarding or service delivery of how I coach, right? To also improve a professional.

Because very often at the end of the relationship with a challenging client, your business is better, your process is tighter, you are more experienced.

So as challenging as it could be to do with the demanding clients, they're the ones that make us better.

Now difficult clients - you cannot please them. No matter what you do it's not good enough. They're not willing to try things [00:10:00] or they're not trying to work with you. To help themselves. And I have to say, I've been lucky not to have too many clients like that, but in the beginning of my, journey, and that's usually happens when we're still figuring out what type of clients we wanna attract and, what's the difference between the demanding or difficult clients.

I did have a client who. Was just not willing to work with me as a coach and do the work. So no matter what approach I tried, how much I tried to help them, every time we met, they had excuses or why things didn't work, or why they didn't really even try to implement solutions that we're working on.

So at some point, I terminated that relationship because. It was a waste of time for them, for me, waste of money for them when they're paying for coaching that they weren't willing to try and implement. And I reallocated the time, effort, and energy into attracting my idea clients. [00:11:00] I also recently coached a client who've had a past clients that sort of turned 180 on.

What they thought their experience was were, was with my clients when they were delivering the service and project. So shortly after the project that my client work on and delivered, their client was very happy. Left raving review and was just. Delighted to work with my client. And then a few months passed, almost a year, new season started and my client reached out to them saying, Hey, do you wanna work together again?

I know you have the, similar projects going on this year. And without really a big explanation that client mentioned to, to my client saying, no, no, no, I don't wanna work. I go with you. I'm gonna. Look for somebody else, which was again, very surprising and shocking to my client just based on the [00:12:00] experience that they've had before and the, happiness and satisfaction they expressed with the first project.

So after a little bit of probing, it turned out that the difficult client of my client was. Reproaching, some situations that happened during delivery of the original project that were outside of their control. That was "force majeure" that even my client talked to at the time.

They were very proactive about it. They agreed on certain solutions for that first measure because they knew it was happening and everything was agreed on. But then. A few months later, complete 180 saying, oh, that, was your fault. I wasn't happy with them, that thing happened outside of your control.

Luckily enough that difficult client that interaction happened after the project was delivered [00:13:00] and after. The initial satisfaction was expressed that it just prevented my client from working with them again. But very, it can happen that you have that situation while you're delivering the project, right?

And that's challenging to do,

How? I handle and I used to handle as a corporate leader, I actually was in operation, so we would deliver services on a regular basis to the same clients whenever there was an escalation that was coming my way.

Sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes it was somebody else making a mistake. Sometimes it was 'force majeure' or sometimes it was just misunderstanding of the process. Here is how I handled, and here is how I want you to think about handling any challenging situation, actually, whether they're with difficult clients or demanding clients.[00:14:00] 

Always try to look ahead as you're delivering the project, as you're delivering the service, you wanna think about is there any potential for challenges, right? And if you are foreseeing that, maybe there will be a delay to delivery of a product, or there will be a delay in how you deliver a project. Or maybe there is a change happening and that will come outside of the budget or there will be change order required or whatever the case might be.

You want to communicate with your clients as fast as possible, transparently. The last thing you want is the client discovering the challenge after the fact, or on their own when you could have prevented it. Sometimes things happen right in our relationship with clients that we couldn't have foreseen, we couldn't prevent it, and then we deal with that then.

But when we can, because we're experts, because we're professionals and we think ahead, you want [00:15:00] to. Communicate that as soon as possible. Now, when you communicate it, not only you wanna be transparent, but also right there and then offer solutions and provide solutions that tells clients, especially the demanding ones that are fair and understanding.

That tells them that you already thought through things. It shows them your professionalism because then. Demanding yet fair person will understand that sometimes challenges happen. It's how you handle them that matters to them, right? If we try to deflect, if we try to blame other circumstances, which clearly let's say it's our mistake, or when we try to ignore and hope that things will.

Solve for themselves, or we're not coming proactively with solution to not only fix the current problem, but prevent it from happening. That's what usually, upsets a demanding clients. [00:16:00] Now a difficult client might have an issue with whatever we do, whether it's an issue or not, and that's why you might wanna consider terminating relationship.

As soon as you discover you have a difficult client.

Now another point that I wanted to say is how to handle maybe complaints from clients or how to handle emails saying this is not going the way it is, or what's going on, and so on. To keep emotions out of the conversations, out of the emails. You always wanna be calm and confident and collected and matter of factly, I've dealt with many escalations where there was numerous touch points where the problem got bigger or where the things worked, but sometimes other things.

So when you are reviewing, let's say what happens in swan, you wanna be matter of fact to say, okay, in this part of this challenge, my team or myself, we follow the process. Here is our process. Because sometimes people don't [00:17:00] remember what we agreed on. They don't remember the process that you follow to deliver your service, even if you communicated it before, which you always should.

People create expectations based on maybe their experience with a similar service provider before, and they forget what we told them or what we agreed on. So sometimes a reminder of the process just says no. This is what we agreed on. This is the process. We're all good, but. If there's challenges that we could have solved or we could have prevented, you want to admit that you wanna take responsibility for it, not pinpoint.

If you have team members who maybe made a mistake, you don't wanna. Throw your team members on the bus at the leader saying, oh, it was Maggie, not me. No. It was us, our company, we take the blame, we deal with it internally, but for the clients it's us. You take the responsibility and then you say, you figure out, okay, this is what we're gonna do to [00:18:00] correct it.

This is what we're gonna do to prevent it from the future. Now, if. Client is being unreasonable because let's say they're difficult and they're trying to blame you for force measure or something that nobody could have predicted, or maybe you even talked about it with the client, say, this is the risk.

What are you going to do? And the client say, yep, I'm willing to accept that risk. And then later on they complain. You push it back. Don't take the blame when there's no due. Take responsibility for things you could have predicted. You could have handled better and so on. But do not take the blame for things that you couldn't have predicted or that even you agreed on before on how to handle and the clients change their mind.

When you do that, the fair and even demanding clients will respect that. They will understand and they will have even more trust in you showing because you show them as a [00:19:00] professional that you don't walk away from owning. The mistakes or the process challenges when they're actually yours and you can do something about it.

So then they will be more respectful of the times where you push back because that was outside of your control or something that you just couldn't.

One more thing I wanna say about difficult clients. So clients that are unreasonable is don't let them run or change your business to accommodate, right? We never want to create processes in our business and the way we run our business on exceptions, right? On some one difficult client that you get. Once a year and rearrange your operations to accommodate them, right?

Don't let difficult clients to [00:20:00] not have boundaries or not enforce your boundaries. So another client of mine, notice that. And they were having more and more walk-ins into their location or clients showing up way before their appointment. And I said, okay, if that's becoming a pattern, what it tells me is that you're teaching your clients to do that, that you're being too accommodating

in the beginning, in our businesses, we might be more flexible because we have time and we don't have a lot of clients. But as your business grows, having structure and teaching your clients, that structure is important for you to be able to actually honor everybody's commitment. 'cause if you keep letting clients twist the schedule, in some clients it might affect your delivery of services to the other clients and hurt them, right?

What you want is when you have difficult trying clients, trying to push the boundaries, you wanna hold those boundaries so [00:21:00] that the quality of service that you deliver to our other clients doesn't suffer. And also your own. Balance between your business, personal life.

And so I see so many business owners sometimes, answering phones on weekends and outside of business hours where their type of business doesn't even necess, it's not necessary, right? The type of business they run is not this emergency life saving things when we have to be available 24 7.

Certain boundaries, you wanna establish them with the clients and not fear that you're lose the business because the vast majority of your ideal clients will respect that.

I'll share with you a three step process, how to determine if a client is difficult or demanding, but before we do that with difficult clients, as soon as you [00:22:00] realize that you cannot help them, and you not, maybe as soon as you realize that. You wanna be able to make them happy, that you wanna be able to deliver the service the way you agreed, not because of your, you're not able as an expert or a professional, but because of their unreasonable demands.

You wanna ask yourself if you want to continue that relationship right now, if you decide to end that relationship. You always wanna end it on a pro. Professional level and, you don't want on your side be burning bridges, meaning you want to find the best moment to end it or the best part of in your process of service delivery when you would have delivered the majority of the commitment or the next stage to the commitment.

You want to make good to the client for whatever. You're not gonna deliver if you're not going to continue till the end, right? So maybe you need to get a refund or [00:23:00] create some sort of make good situation. You want to give a client notice, you want to communicate that properly to them.

So then you ended on as best. Terms as possible. Now, of course, the difficult client's reaction is something you cannot control, but you wanna feel good about the way you handled it. You don't want high negative emotions around that kind of end of agreement. Ideally, in terms of. Difficult clients. We wanna learn how to spot them before and not get into those relationships.

So reviewing your sales process and your qualifications process to. Have questions in there or certain parts of the process that will be able to detect difficult clients and, not for you to eliminate them into, [00:24:00] not get into a service relationship with them is the ideal situation.

So as I challenged you in the beginning, I wanted to, I want to invite you to review your current clientele or clientele from this year and think about out of all those clients, and there will be usually a minority demanding clients or difficult clients. Majority of people are really easy to deal with, they're great. They chose you to deliver the service. They're happy with it. See if you are dealing with a demanding or a difficult client now. Once you discover that if it's a difficult client, then really think about, do I want to continue my relationship with them?

And if so, for how long? Where am I in my relationship with them? What can I learn from it? How can I prevent from signing on those clients again? And then make decisions [00:25:00] how you wanna proceed if it's a current client. The demanding client. You want to challenge yourself to say, okay, what are they teaching me?

Why is there, you know what? Why do I think they're demanding? Is there anything I need to improve on? Is there anything I need to innovate? Do I need to make good? Maybe, depending on the situation, I might need to give them. A discount or their bonus or something if they're already a little bit dissatisfied with the process, or they may be encounters in their challenges that I didn't want them to encounter.

See how you can make good for them. And then think of course how to deliver service and wow them going forward. So then, they will be pleasantly surprised and happy to keep working with you. And then of course, always [00:26:00] when really with the interaction with any client, you wanna learn and look back and see how you can improve, whether it's improving by just.

How you can improve, whether it's in the service delivery, project management, client onboarding, or if you're looking back at a difficult client situation, how you want to get better and spotting them much sooner and not entering into service relationships with them. So before we finish the episode, I would love to hear maybe some of the stories that you had to deal with that were challenging for you, whether the clients were difficult on demanding, and maybe if you have any questions or how could I have had, handled it better, or what could I have done to prevent this from happening or prevent from entering a relationship?

I am happy to help. I would love. For you to share some stories with me, Maggie, at [00:27:00] stairway to leadership.com. Definitely in my corporate career as a leader, at some point, all you do is challenging, demanding and difficult clients and helping your team handle that and responding to escalations and so on.

So I've gotten really good at this and of course, I'm using those skills to help my clients get really good at this. I would love to help you and also hear some of your stories, so don't be scared to share them with me and otherwise, see you next week. Bye.